Computers and mobile devices are ubiquitous today. These devices are often equipped with network connectivity, digital cameras, microphones, and other means of capturing, creating, and sharing digital media and content. The ease with which people can create and share content can create several problems. People often create and share personal and private content. They may select a few, close individuals to share this content with but once the content is in the digital universe, they have lost control of it. This can lead to content which an author intended to be private being widely dispersed and viewed in contexts which the author did not anticipate or prepare for. Unanticipated distribution of private content can have negative effects on an individual's personal and professional life with important and costly ramifications.
Content sharing and distributed collaboration is also used in the professional world where security concerns may be an even higher priority. The unintentional loss of private data in these environments can enable corporate espionage, lead to the loss of intellectual property, the unwanted dissemination of information which might damage a company's public image, and other serious problems. Unwanted dissemination can occur through loss of privacy control as described above, or through theft of data.
Despite existing security methods, each time data is transferred, it is at risk of being intercepted and deciphered by unintended parties and current distributed collaboration methodologies often require the repeated transfer of content back and forth between collaborators. This repeated transfer not only carries an increased risk of data theft but takes up large amounts of bandwidth, especially with hi-definition video and other complex forms of digital media. Additionally, content may become degraded after the repeated compression, encryption, decryption, and decompression involved in distributed collaboration using current technologies. Furthermore, transfers between the mobile devices where much of this content is created, edited, and shared, can quickly lead to very costly data charges for the collaborators.
Another problem with current distributed collaboration methodologies is the division of authorship and ownership rights for individual contributions to collaboratively created content. An original author may create content but someone else may significantly modify and extend the content in a collaborative environment. Dividing ownership and control is difficult and the problem intensifies as more and more authors collaborate on a single piece of content. If all authors individually control the whole content, then individual authors lose control of privacy and distribution. If control is retained jointly, then a single author can effectively end collaboration and hold up distribution of other authors' contributions. These problems can lead to disagreements among collaborators, theft of ideas, inequitable distribution of profits, and potentially valuable content never being shared with the public.